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Moon Project - Oval House Theatre

STILLPOINT is presenting Moon Project, written and conceived by award-winning performer and theatre maker Rachel Blackman, at the Oval House Theatre – from October 29 to November 16, 2013.

From the Brighton based creator of Tryptich: Three Attempts at Love (2011) comprised of The Growing Room (2011), Steal Compass, Drive North Disappear (2010) and The Art of Catastrophe (2008) comes a two hander asking how do you recover, when, in a moment, everything you thought you knew is blown into a billion pieces?

Two people suffer nostalgia for impossible futures: Shahab yearns for home but cannot return. Leila yearns for transcendence but cannot escape. One day their lives collide and everything atomises. Stillpoint explore the cosmology of a crash and its unexpected trajectories.

Inspired by research into space travel, peak experience and radical shifts in perspective, the show looks at flying free, the inevitability of gravity and how we deal with the law of unintended consequences.

Rachel Blackman said: “Two years ago I saw David Singleton’s documentary In The Shadow of The Moon which features interviews, in extreme close up, with astronauts who had experienced the moon landings. Seeing these, now elderly men – once fighter pilots and engineers – attempt to describe the experience of seeing, for example, the sun, the moon and the earth in one panoramic vision, was incredibly moving and I was drawn to investigate how they coped upon their return to more earthly and mundane matters.

“It seems there was a mixed bag of retreat from public life, broken marriages and alcoholism. There was even a new religion (The Noetics Institute). This struggle became the metaphoric seed for Moon Project. How do we stay sane if we don’t find a way to come “home” in a meaningful way following an “out of this world” experience? How do we grow unless we are prepared to risk everything that is familiar?”

Stillpoint won the Fringe Review award for Outstanding Theatre in 2010. Previous work includes Rachel Blackman’s Triptych: Three Attempts at Love.

Created and devised by the company, Moon Project is performed by Rachel Blackman and Jules Munns and directed by award-winning director Paul Hodson, whose previous credits include Fever Pitch and Meeting Joe Strummer. Movement direction is by Emma Roberts and costume and set design by Pearl Bates.